Amazon EC2 Functionality

Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to launch instances with a variety of operating systems, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network’s access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire.

To use Amazon EC2, you simply:

• Select a pre-configured, templated image to get up and running immediately. Or create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing your applications, libraries, data, and associated configuration settings.
• Configure security and network access on your Amazon EC2 instance.
• Choose which instance type(s) and operating system you want, then start, terminate, and monitor as many instances of your AMI as needed, using the web service APIs or the variety of management tools provided.
• Determine whether you want to run in multiple locations, utilize static IP endpoints, or attach persistent block storage to your instances.
• Pay only for the resources that you actually consume, like instance-hours or data transfer.

Service Highlights

Elastic – Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.

Completely Controlled – You have complete control of your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine. You can stop your instance while retaining the data on your boot partition and then subsequently restart the same instance using web service APIs. Instances can be rebooted remotely using web service APIs. You also have access to console output of your instances.

Flexible – You have the choice of multiple instance types, operating systems, and software packages. Amazon EC2 allows you to select a configuration of memory, CPU, instance storage, and the boot partition size that is optimal for your choice of operating system and application. For example, your choice of operating systems includes numerous Linux distributions, Microsoft Windows Server and OpenSolaris.

Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to provide a complete solution for computing, query processing and storage across a wide range of applications.

Reliable – Amazon EC2 offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and predictably commissioned. The service runs within Amazon’s proven network infrastructure and datacenters. The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region.

• Amazon EC2 includes web service interfaces to configure firewall settings that control network access to and between groups of instances.
• When launching Amazon EC2 resources within Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), you can isolate your compute instances by specifying the IP range you wish to use, and connect to your existing IT infrastructure using industry-standard encrypted IPsec VPN.
• For more information on Amazon EC2 security refer to our Amazon Web Services: Overview of Security Process document.

• On-Demand Instances – On-Demand Instances let you pay for compute capacity by the hour with no long-term commitments. This frees you from the costs and complexities of planning, purchasing, and maintaining hardware and transforms what are commonly large fixed costs into much smaller variable costs. On-Demand Instances also remove the need to buy “safety net” capacity to handle periodic traffic spikes.
• Reserved Instances – Reserved Instances give you the option to make a low, one-time payment for each instance you want to reserve and in turn receive a significant discount on the hourly usage charge for that instance. After the one-time payment for an instance, that instance is reserved for you, and you have no further obligation; you may choose to run that instance for the discounted usage rate for the duration of your term, or when you do not use the instance, you will not pay usage charges on it.
• Spot Instances – Spot Instances allow customers to bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long as their bid exceeds the current Spot Price. The Spot Price changes periodically based on supply and demand, and customers whose bids meet or exceed it gain access to the available Spot Instances. If you have flexibility in when your applications can run, Spot Instances can significantly lower your Amazon EC2 costs. See here for more details on Spot Instances.

Features

Amazon EC2 provides a number of powerful features for building scalable, failure resilient, enterprise class applications, including:

• Amazon Elastic Block Store – Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) offers persistent storage for Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes provide off-instance storage that persists independently from the life of an instance. Amazon EBS volumes are highly available, highly reliable volumes that can be leveraged as an Amazon EC2 instance’s boot partition or attached to a running Amazon EC2 instance as a standard block device. When used as a boot partition, Amazon EC2 instances can be stopped and subsequently restarted, enabling you to only pay for the storage resources used while maintaining your instance’s state. Amazon EBS volumes offer greatly improved durability over local Amazon EC2 instance stores, as Amazon EBS volumes are automatically replicated on the backend (in a single Availability Zone). For those wanting even more durability, Amazon EBS provides the ability to create point-in-time consistent snapshots of your volumes that are then stored in Amazon S3, and automatically replicated across multiple Availability Zones. These snapshots can be used as the starting point for new Amazon EBS volumes, and can protect your data for long term durability. You can also easily share these snapshots with co-workers and other AWS developers. See Amazon Elastic Block Store for more details on this feature.

• Multiple Locations – Amazon EC2 provides the ability to place instances in multiple locations. Amazon EC2 locations are composed of Regions and Availability Zones. Availability Zones are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Region. By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from failure of a single location. Regions consist of one or more Availability Zones, are geographically dispersed, and will be in separate geographic areas or countries. The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region. Amazon EC2 is currently available in four regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Singapore).

• Elastic IP Addresses – Elastic IP addresses are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing. An Elastic IP address is associated with your account not a particular instance, and you control that address until you choose to explicitly release it. Unlike traditional static IP addresses, however, Elastic IP addresses allow you to mask instance or Availability Zone failures by programmatically remapping your public IP addresses to any instance in your account. Rather than waiting on a data technician to reconfigure or replace your host, or waiting for DNS to propagate to all of your customers, Amazon EC2 enables you to engineer around problems with your instance or software by quickly remapping your Elastic IP address to a replacement instance. In addition, you can optionally configure the reverse DNS record of any of your Elastic IP addresses by filling out this form.

• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud – Amazon VPC is a secure and seamless bridge between a company’s existing IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud. Amazon VPC enables enterprises to connect their existing infrastructure to a set of isolated AWS compute resources via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection, and to extend their existing management capabilities such as security services, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems to include their AWS resources. See Amazon Virtual Private Cloud for more details.

• Amazon CloudWatch – Amazon CloudWatch is a web service that provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources, starting with Amazon EC2. It provides you with visibility into resource utilization, operational performance, and overall demand patterns—including metrics such as CPU utilization, disk reads and writes, and network traffic. To use Amazon CloudWatch, simply select the Amazon EC2 instances that you’d like to monitor; within minutes, Amazon CloudWatch will begin aggregating and storing monitoring data that can be accessed using web service APIs or Command Line Tools. See Amazon CloudWatch for more details.

• Auto Scaling – Auto Scaling allows you to automatically scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down according to conditions you define. With Auto Scaling, you can ensure that the number of Amazon EC2 instances you’re using scales up seamlessly during demand spikes to maintain performance, and scales down automatically during demand lulls to minimize costs. Auto Scaling is particularly well suited for applications that experience hourly, daily, or weekly variability in usage. Auto Scaling is enabled by Amazon CloudWatch and available at no additional charge beyond Amazon CloudWatch fees. See Auto Scaling for more details.

• Elastic Load Balancing – Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. It enables you to achieve even greater fault tolerance in your applications, seamlessly providing the amount of load balancing capacity needed in response to incoming application traffic. Elastic Load Balancing detects unhealthy instances within a pool and automatically reroutes traffic to healthy instances until the unhealthy instances have been restored. You can enable Elastic Load Balancing within a single Availability Zone or across multiple zones for even more consistent application performance. Amazon CloudWatch can be used to capture a specific Elastic Load Balancer’s operational metrics, such as request count and request latency, at no additional cost beyond Elastic Load Balancing fees. See Elastic Load Balancing for more details.

Instance Types

Standard Instances

Instances of this family are well suited for most applications.

• Small Instance (Default) 1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of local instance storage, 32-bit platform
• Large Instance 7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform
• Extra Large Instance 15 GB of memory, 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform

High-Memory Instances

Instances of this family offer large memory sizes for high throughput applications, including database and memory caching applications.

• High-Memory Extra Large Instance 17.1 GB memory, 6.5 ECU (2 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each), 420 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform
• High-Memory Double Extra Large Instance 34.2 GB of memory, 13 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform
• High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large Instance 68.4 GB of memory, 26 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform

High-CPU Instances

Instances of this family have proportionally more CPU resources than memory (RAM) and are well suited for compute-intensive applications.

• High-CPU Medium Instance 1.7 GB of memory, 5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), 350 GB of local instance storage, 32-bit platform
• High-CPU Extra Large Instance 7 GB of memory, 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform

EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) – One EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor.

See Amazon EC2 Pricing for details on costs for each instance type.

See Amazon EC2 Instance Types for a more detailed description of the differences between the available instance types, as well as a complete description of an EC2 Compute Unit.

Operating Systems and Software

Operating Systems

Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are preconfigured with an ever-growing list of operating systems. We work with our partners and community to provide you with the most choice possible. You are also empowered to use our bundling tools to upload your own operating systems. The operating systems currently available to use with your Amazon EC2 instances include:

Software

Amazon EC2 enables our partners and customers to build and customize Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with software based on your needs. We have hundreds of free and paid AMIs available for you to use. A small sampling of the software available for use today within Amazon EC2 includes:

Pricing

Resources

Developer Resources

view all

• AWS Management Console
• WSDL
• Release Notes
• Documentation
• Sample Code & Libraries
• Developer Tools
• Articles & Tutorials
• Amazon Machine Images
• Public Data Sets on AWS
• ElasticFox Firefox Extension
• Community Forum

Additional Product Information

• FAQs
• Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement
• Amazon Elastic Block Store
• Instance Types
• Amazon CloudWatch
• Auto Scaling
• Elastic Load Balancing
• Amazon EC2 running Microsoft
• Amazon EC2 running IBM
• Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement
• Service Health Dashboard

Related Services

• Amazon DevPay
• AWS Premium Support
• Amazon Simple Storage Service
• Amazon Simple Queue Service

Detailed Description

Using Amazon EC2 to Run Instances

Amazon EC2 allows you to set up and configure everything about your instances from your operating system up to your applications. An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is simply a packaged-up environment that includes all the necessary bits to set up and boot your instance. Your AMIs are your unit of deployment. You might have just one AMI or you might compose your system out of several building block AMIs (e.g., webservers, appservers, and databases). Amazon EC2 provides a number of tools to make creating an AMI easy including the AWS Management Console.

You can also choose from a library of globally available AMIs that provide useful instances. For example, if you just want a simple Linux server, you can choose one of the standard Linux distribution AMIs. Once you have set up your account and uploaded your AMIs, you are ready to boot your instance. You can start your AMI on any number and any type of instance by calling the RunInstances API.

If you wish to run more than 20 On-Demand or Reserved Instances or 100 Spot Instances, create more than 20 EBS volumes, need more than 5 Elastic IP addresses or 5 Elastic Load Balancers, or need to send large quantities of email from your EC2 account, please complete the Amazon EC2 instance request form, Amazon EBS volume request form, Elastic IP request form, Elastic Load Balancers, or the Email request form respectively and your request will be considered.

Paying for What You Use

You will be charged at the end of each month for your EC2 resources actually consumed.

As an example, assume you launch 100 instances of the Small type costing $0.085 per hour at some point in time. The instances will begin booting immediately, but they won’t necessarily all start at the same moment. Each instance will store its actual launch time. Thereafter, each instance will charge for its hours (at $.085/hour) of execution at the beginning of each hour relative to the time it launched. Each instance will run until one of the following occurs: you terminate the instance with the TerminateInstances API call (or an equivalent tool), the instance shuts itself down (e.g. UNIX “shutdown” command), or the host terminates due to software or hardware failure. Partial instance hours consumed are billed as full hours.

Getting Started

The best way to understand Amazon EC2 is to work through the Getting Started Guide, part of our Technical Documentation. Within a few minutes, you will be able to log into your own instance and start playing!

Intended Usage and Restrictions

Your use of this service is subject to the Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement